Eastern Geographic Science Center Land Surface Change Project

Project Description

Project Tasks
Task 27
Task 29
Task 30
Task 31

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Project Tasks

Task 27- Consequences of Potomac Watershed Land-use and Land Cover Change

The Potomac Watershed has been changed by human-induced and natural processes, some of which have significant impact on ecosystem health and sustainability. Improved information and understanding about

  • the state of the land surface;
  • and the rates and patterns,
  • causes/drivers,
  • and consequences of landscape change
are needed to help scientists and decision-makers in land-use planning and management and in natural resource utilization/conservation. The need to integrate and apply information to help understand the consequences of land surface change on sediment erosion and deposition, forest quality, habitat fragmentation, overall ecosystem and watershed health, and other factors operating at local and broad regional scales is critical to managing the natural resources of the Potomac Watershed and Chesapeake Bay. For more information visit the Consequences of Potomac Watershed Land-use and Land Cover Change Task - The Mattawoman Watershed site.

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Task 29 - Land Cover Trends

The focus of the Land Cover Trends activity is to document within a geographic framework (ecoregions), the rates, causes, and consequences of land use and land cover change for the conterminous United States for the 1972-2000 period. Fundamental questions that must be addressed include:

  1. what are the overall rates of land cover change, and what are the rates of change by sector (i.e., what are the rates of conversion from agricultural to urban land cover);
  2. and how do the rates of change vary locally, regionally; and temporally?
Additional details can be found on the Land Cover Trends Task page.

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task integration model

Task 30 - National Land Cover Dataset

The NLCD 2001 is a Landsat-based land cover database with several independent data layers, which allow users a wide variety of potential applications. Primary components of the database include:

  1. normalized imagery for 3 time periods;
  2. ancillary layers including elevation data;
  3. per-pixel estimates of percent imperviousness and percent tree canopy;
  4. 21 classes of land cover data derived using CART techniques;
  5. and classification rules, confidence estimates and metadata from LC classification.
There are 65 zones in the conterminous U.S. Task 30 involves completing NLCD for zone 45 (Lower Mississippi) and zone 61 (Northern Appalachians).

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Task 31 - Graph-theoretic models of land cover change

The efficient description of land cover datasets is a major challenge to analysis. Although they are based on physical measurements, classification schemes are subject to judgement. They are scale-bound, tend to be quite large, and difficult to integrate with other types of GIS and temporal data.

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